Kenneth Craddock Sears

The Supreme Court and the New Deal: An Answer to Texas

Resolved by the State Bar of Texas: I. That the Supreme Court of the United States is losing, if it has not already lost, the high esteem in which it has been held by the people, an esteem created by their belief that it had always remained free of political, personal and unworthy motives and had interpreted and declared the law as it is written, according to tradition and precedent, and agreeable to the provisions of the Constitution and the Bill of Rights. 2. Lately it has repeatedly overruled decisions, precedents and landmarks of the law, of long standing, without assigning any valid reason therefor, dismissing the question with a wave of the hand, and contenting itself with the assertion that these precedents have been eroded by the processes of the years; or basing its decision on casuistry and sophistry rather than logic. An example of this is found in decisions of the Court by which jurisdiction is held under the Interstate Commerce Clause of the Constitution. 3. We do not believe that any person who at all values the judicial process or distinguishes its method and philosophy from those of the political and legislative process would abandon or substantially impair the rule of stare decisis. Unless the assumption is substantially true that cases will be disposed of by application of known principles and previously disclosed courses of reasoning, our common law process would become the most intolerable kind of ex post facto judicial law-making. 4. By plainly disregarding these principles and these processes, and by its vacillations and uncertainties, and the inconsistencies of its decisions, it has rendered it impossible for the practicing lawyer to advise his client as to what the law is today, or even to offer a guess as to what it will be tomorrow. And by this conduct and by controversies within its own personnel, it has subjected itself to the suspicion, widely held, that it speaks, or undertakes to speak, in the voice of the appointing power, rather than the voice of the law, as witness the following from a writer, well known and widely read: Mr. Roosevelts appointees to the Supreme Court have just ruled that all insurance is under federal control. To do so they have reversed previous decisions that had stood for a hundred years. And this from the Houston Post, widely circulated and respected throughout the country: